Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Bagel "Husks" with TOMATO SLICES

I went to Manhattan last week and had my first bagel. I say "first bagel" because the bagels I ate there were so unlike all the other bagels I'd eaten that they made their status as bagels suspect. Basically, those Baruch Spinoza Everything Bagels at Trader Joe's are not bagels. They're tasty, and they make excellent transporters for cream cheese, and they even have a hole in the center, but they are not bagels. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the bagel shop, but it's pretty much located at 1st Avenue and 23rd, near Gramercy Park, i.e. the bagels could be labeled "rich snob bagels," but that would be unfair to the bagels. Anyway, before returning to Massachusetts, I purchased a baker's dozen and summarily froze them upon re-entering my abode.

Unfortunately, as necessary as freezing the bagels was, I was not able to thaw them out and reheat them in any manner that produced a decent approximation of the real thing. Too bad. Or was it?

Yesterday me and my sweetie had some bagels for breakfast but neither of us could finish our bagel on account of them being so massive. She went off to a tile showroom in Hartford and I went to the hardware store to buy mini blinds, leaving two bagel halves on the table. Installing mini blinds is a much bigger pain in the ass than you'd think and when I finished, I noticed that I'd developed quite the proper appetite. "Hmm," I thought to myself, insofar as one can have internal narration on a sweltering hot day, "What about making some bagel chips?"

I set about slicing the leftover bagel halves as thinly as I possibly could, whacked them with a bunch of olive oil, some salt and pepper, and then finally zoomed them into the toaster oven at a very low temperature to dry out and turn into BAGEL HUSKS.™ I put the trade mark there because BAGEL HUSKS™ is my invention, a name I invented within the exclusive confines of my own noggin'. Anyway, this morning I made some goat cheese spread by combining goat cheese with olive oil and adding some chopped chives and pepper. Then I spread the spread on the BAGEL HUSKS™, carefully, so as not to crack them, put one beautiful slice of tomato on each, and finished the whole thing off with a spritz of lime.